Jaroslav Stoklaska put it.) The son of Tomas
Bat'a has returned to reclaim property taken
over by the communists and has purchased
45 retail stores and a shoe factory in a joint
venture with the Czech government.
Pilsen's landmark industry also faces
the future with a smile. Its oldest brewery,
Pilsner Urquell, the "old source" Pilsner,
exports around the world. Its smooth frothy
brew, rich in hops, often imitated, has made
"pilsner" the dictionary entry for fine
light beer.
"In 1295, when the town was granted its
royal charter, 260 families were given brew
ing rights here," said Petr Zizkovsky, direc
tor of Pilsen's Brewery Museum.
On our way to Pilsner Urquell we joined a
crowd in Republic Square celebrating the
brewery's 150th anniversary. We sampled
pints from tank trucks that deliver brew to
pubs across the land and munched ldngose,
flat bread laced with cheese and garlic. An
oompah band warmed the autumn air and a
tipsy quartet locked shoulders in song:
A Bohemian lass, a golden beer,
Such joys only Czechs know....
We joined a busload of revelers for a tour
of the brewery. Inside the pungent boiling
room, day-shift boss Vaclav Janouskovec, in
a spotless lab coat, controlled flows and tem
peratures of the hops simmering in 6,500
gallon copper kettles-16 altogether-with a
stainless-steel panel of blinking lights and a
row of antique brass faucets.
I asked Janouskovec what 700-year-old
alchemy converts such aromatic mush into
Pilsner's famous "beer of gourmets."
"No secrets at all," he insisted. "Just the
pure water from our own deep wells, selected
hops from nearby Zatec, fermentation in oak
casks-and constant attention to detail.
"No one 'manufactures' great beer," he
added. "Brewing is a precision craft."
N EARLY SHOWPIECE of the industrial
revolution, the northern Czech bor
derlands- part of a region known as
the Sudetenland before nearly three
million German-speaking inhabit
ants were expelled after World War
II-long produced coal, steel, chemicals,
machinery, and fine crystal. Communist five
year plans stoked the factory towns to their
limit while ignoring the growing pall settling
over the 250-mile belt that arcs from the coal
fields around Chomutov to the steel mills of
Ostrava, near the Polish border.
"Ostrava's schools had to limit children's
outdoor play," said Frantisek Lukis, who
once lived in the town. "We kept windows
closed, even in summer; otherwise soot black
ened walls and curtains."
A communist song of the seventies extolled:
"How much beauty surrounds .. . smoke
from the factories and ... children playing in
the sand. .. ." Another patriotic chimney
scene still decorates the Czech hundred
crown note.
On my way through Teplice, 60 miles
north of Prague, the gray winter air, acrid
with sulfur dioxide, seared my eyes and
throat. Teplice was once a fashionable spa
town. Beethoven, Goethe, and Chopin took
the waters here. Today life expectancy in
Teplice is three years shorter than in the rest
of the Czech Republic.
From the bare, acid-poisoned forests in the
Ore Mountains, I looked out over the city
hidden under a blanket of smog 2,000 feet
below. Only a few conical hills, one shoulder
ing the ruins of Doubravka Castle, and a
dozen tall smokestacks spewing grit poked up
through the deadly veil to outline Teplice and
its surrounding no-man's-land of coalfields.
The brown coal, or lignite, that fuels Czech
factories and power plants is also the coun
try's major polluter. Huge strip mines show
as blank spots on the region's maps; dur
ing the past four decades monster mining
machines have chewed up a hundred villages
and towns.
At Libkovice, near Teplice, debris from
bulldozed houses, a bakery, even a church lit
ter orchards. "We were a village of a thou
sand people," Mayor Stanislav Brichacek
told me. The Havel government had ordered
the state coal company to desist, but the order
was lost somewhere in the state bureaucracy.
While sulfurous clouds make parts of the
republics barely livable, energy alterna
tives-nuclear power plants and hydroelec
tric stations-stand shackled by controversy.
An hour southeast of Bratislava, where the
Danube forms the border between Slovakia
and Hungary, a vast hydroelectric scheme
languishes half complete amid a tangle of
politics. In 1978 the communist regimes
of Hungary and Czechoslovakia began joint
construction of the
(Continued on page 28)
Czechoslovakia: The Velvet Divorce